setting up my 104" Slick ready to play, here's a pic of the receiver install...

...Nano's are awesome, but the antenna are small and the recommendation is to get them as far from wire and metal obstructions as is practical. My thoughts were a single ribbon of signal wires and only two power wires to pinless receivers is about as good as this would get. In the pic, the JR coloured servo lead is actually all signal wires, one wire per channel, and receiver power is the twisted black/red wire running along side.

It did extend the distance between Rx and servo by a couple of feet, but everything is directly wired, each servo is getting its own signal, and the servos only have one plug between them and the receiver (extensions directly soldered to the receivers).

All flight surfaces are off two Castle BEC-Pro regulators at 8 volts, a single Castle BEC at 6 volts for throttle servo and ignition cutoff. Power from two 3S 2200mah packs, through two double throw switches (four contacts for redundancy... though may change to a soft switch arrangement). The regulators and wiring harness are all mounted in the canister box to make things tidy as well as provide awesome air circulation for the regulators.

There's two servos per flight surface, so the Nanos are mapped to have these outputs...

Images

We have the boards inhouse and are assembling and testing. This part is taking a bit of time as we had to modify the plastic housing of the module to work with the A9. The A9 has a different pin location, so we had to make new holes for the pins.

So, in light of recent FCC delays on the 16 channel Tx, I'm sort of thinking about maybe getting an Aurora 9. As I understand, the module is about ready, but not quite ready yet.. right? So are we talking a week or two here, or are we further out on this still?

The module is done. We are doing the assembly of them. We have actually shipped some of them with the Futaba label (so we can have a FCC legally marked product). The A9 labels are not here yet, which is the last piece missing.

Well, after a 400' range test we flew one of the turbine birds today with two of the Nano recievers - used to get the 11 channels needed to fly the jet. Those things amaze me more and more everytime we use them.

104 Slick made her first event this weekend, having some ignition issues, but no radio issues. Set up a buddy box with a second A9 and let anyone who wanted a chance to fly the plane. A couple of guys really specked the plane out being too scared of anything happening... thought popped in my head that massive airplane was specked out using the tiny receivers no problem. One of the guys that gave it a go was an A9 pilot, and with the buddy box noticed the link improvement over stock...

Event is going great, plane and radio performing flawlessly. Here's a pic of some hover bowling

(people should update to 1.08 on the A9 too, the new expo is wonderful. was flying super slow rolls from one side of the field to the other over the weekend, wouldn't be possible on the previous version while still using 3D rates)